Linux Magazine has a profile of Daniel Fore and the Elementary project. Elementary is a Linux distro that's committed to a clean and simple user experience, but it's more than a distro - it's actually a multi-pronged effort to make improvements to the user experience for a whole ecosystem of components, including icons, a GTK theme, Midori improvements, Nautilus, and even Firefox. The work that elementary is doing isn't limited to their own distro, and some of their work is available in current, and perhaps future, Ubuntu releases. The results are really striking, and I think it's probably the handsomest Linux UI I've ever seen.

Linux is just a tip of an iceberg in an OS [and *nix based, or similar] world

We're talking desktop, here, and realistically, Linux is the only UNIX variant relevant in that environment - if Linux desktop has just a few percent of the market, all those others you mention aren't even a fraction of a percent. Not a lot of Minix, AIX, or VMS desktops out there...

Hey, we're talking IT, not marketing or market share here. Why would anyone care for the stats? the fact is the fact: these DEs and WMs don't belong to linux exclusively and some of us use it on other OSs.